recognizing that stakeholder management and engagement are pivotal to project success, I'd like to tap into the expertise of this forum. Juggling multiple stakeholders across various projects, maintaining records of interactions, tracking shifting attitudes, and producing insightful reports can be quite a challenge.
Could you share your insights and recommendations based on your experience? Specifically, I'm curious about the tools you rely on for stakeholder management. While Excel and notebooks are common, I'm wondering if any of you have discovered software tools that stand out in this regard?
Appreciate your time and expertise!
Best regards,
Gabriel Saving Changes...
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Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Gabriel,
in my 3 decades doing stakeholder management in projects, I did not use a tool other than Excel. One reason is the sensitive nature of stakeholder data, especially in your own organization's hierarchy. Also, stakeholder engagement is primarily a personal, human activity, which requires trust and confidentiality, sometimes political pressure. The outcome is a relationship that can be leveraged in any upcoming problem, not a rational data pool or predetermined process.
Now, given the rise of AI, I ran into several tool that can be used to analyse communication, sentiments and summarize meetings (sembly.ai). None of them is a complete stakeholder info repository, but they create input to it. Saving Changes...
While MS Excel tends to be the "go to" tool for such data, a more collaborative technique is to use a visual stakeholder identification & analysis approach such as a salience chart or XY chart with influence/impact as the axes. This could be done in a collaborative tool such as Miro or Mural.
Gabriel, From my professional experience, I'd break down the stakeholder management's effort and leveraging the tools in this realm into three groups: 1. MS Excel - e.g., stakeholder register, stakeholder analysis, Power/Interest grid, Raci matrix (an alternative to it can be DARE matrix; learn more at https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/peop...make-decisions)
Thanks for the mention Maria, that's a great list of tools.
Our view is that stakeholder management in large organizations, particularly those with a dynamic and distributed workforce, becomes unwieldy to manage in Excel, especially with multiple change portfolios and concurrent initiatives.
Thomas makes an excellent point regarding Enterprise data security, which is why we integrate our stakeholder systems with your existing org chart systems. Our founder, Gavin Wedell, explains how it works in this video: https://changeplan.co/blog/single-stakeholder-list Saving Changes...
Gabriel, All the options here are good, but I would recommend looking at purpose-built software for stakeholder relationship management software. Perhaps in 2023, there weren't as many tools available but now there are multiple options that include Jambo (https://www.jambo.cloud) and Staketracker (https://sustainet.com/stakeholder-management-software/). There are many more if you still have a need for this. I think it is more a case of knowing the objective you have for needing a stakeholder management tool that will help choose one.
For stakeholder management I use tools that help track relationships and signals, not just data. Simple CRM style tools like HubSpot free CRM or Notion with custom tables work well for small portfolios. For enterprise needs Jira with a custom stakeholder board, Confluence, or MS Teams + Planner help link interactions to tasks and decisions. The key is consistent updates and clear status tags for influence and engagement. Saving Changes...
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